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February 09, 2013

The Top 5+1 for January, 2013

The Top 5 is my monthly look at the 5 most popular posts from the previous month based on data from Google Analytics. The +1 gives me an opportunity to highlight a post that I wish had made the top 5, but didn't.

So here are the 5 most popular posts from January, 2013

1) Dog Attack Fatalities - 2012 Final Report - This isn't a huge suprise, this post is generally one of the wider-read posts each year on this blog. In it, we highlight the CIRCUMSTANCES behind these incidents and what can be learned from these circumstances.

3) Some Positive Pit Bull Press -- KC Pet Project, like a lot of urban shelters, has a fairly high percentage of dogs that enter our shelter that are pit bull type dogs (our numbers are lower than many others). So earlier last month we promoted the positive traits of these types of dogs and the media did a great job of sharing the story.

4) The Pyramid of Saving Lives -- what the 90% looks like -- This overview I thought was helpful to people to understand the makeup of the 90% of animals that are generally considered "savable" in open-admission shelters. There isn't a clear cut line of "these are savable, these aren't" and there is a lot of grey area in the last 5-10% of animals with special needs, but are still savable.

5) The World of Made up Statistics - In this post, I tackle some made up statistics a lawyer uses to try to create fear and hysteria. Unfortunately, made up statistics are not all that uncommon in animal welfare. Fortunately, the internet provides us opportunites to check their data.

+1 Considering your sources - redux - what is a reliable source - On the internet, voices appear to be equal and it can sometimes be tough to determine which sources are reliable, and which ones are not. In this post I attempt to provide some insight into how I try to weed out reliable and unreliable sources. I actually got quite a bit of feedback on this post, and was surprised that it didn't make the top 5 list.